Microsoft Outlook 2003 Forum

Any comments/suggestions welcome. TIA.

It probably relies on Microsoft's Core Fonts. A lot of Windows programs, especially Microsoft ones, rely on them. I use Crossover Games Mac myself, and it doesn't have the Corefonts.
For Linux, try winetricks (http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks), for Mac try TRiX (Mac frontend to winetricks), included in Kronenberg's build of Darwine (Wine for Mac) (http://www.kronenberg.org/darwine/).
On Linux, look at the link above, basically in a terminal it's
wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
sh winetricks corefonts
a lot of the other packages help in running Windows programs, like vcrun6
Copy the fonts to wherever CrossOver Linux keeps its bottles, to your application's windows/Fonts directory.

On my Mac I found I had to manually copy the included Unix tools from TRiX to /usr/local/bin. There's a newer version out, so it may work now. It includes cabextract, which is needed to extract the fonts. If you have a Mac, run Darwine first, so it creates its directories. See if TRiX works. If it can't find cabextract (it will also use curl instead of wget), open the TRiX package by right-clicking it and Show Package Contents, and go to Contents/Resources/bin , and from the Finder also Go To Folder /usr/local/bin (which exist if you ran Darwine, that's where it puts Fontforge), and copy the 3 Unix tools over (wget, cabextract, sha1sum). Run TRiX, and choose the corefonts and anything else you fancy.
That downloads and extracts the MS Corefonts to ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/Fonts
Copy from here into the CrossOver bottle you installed Outlook to, for instance
~/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/Bottles/Outlook/drive_c/windows/Fonts
where "CrossOver" is the name of your application; I have "CrossOver Games", and "Outlook" is the name of the bottle where you installed Outlook into, it's probably different for you.
Restart CrossOver, and try Outlook. It should now have access to the default Microsoft fonts.

msandersen wrote:

It probably relies on Microsoft's Core Fonts. A lot of Windows
programs, especially Microsoft ones, rely on them. I use Crossover
Games Mac myself, and it doesn't have the Corefonts.

Actually, it does. It's a "dependency" which is hidden by default. In CrossOver's preferences, on the Installer Assistant tab, uncheck "Hide service packs and dependencies" to show it. Then select Core Fonts from the supported packages list and CrossOver will download and install them for you.

OK, found them. I'm sure there's a reason why they're hidden by default, be it clean uncluttered design or similar, but if you have a list of known apps that rely on them, like Office, they could be downloaded and installed (upon user approval) along with it if not already installed. For many games I'm sure it's not an issue, as they usually have their own interfaces and fonts, but for other "regular" apps, especially text- or number- processing apps, it's probably a necessity. Probably safer to just install them when CrossOver is installed, at least if a Default bottle is chosen, and copy them across if another bottle is created for an app which might need them, or perhaps just symlinked (might cause an issue if the Default bottle is deleted or changed). Not sure if there's an auto-detect method if an app looks for these fonts, but if there is, they could be copied across then from the Default bottle.
Windows apps can assume a lot of things exist, which cannot be included in Wine for copyright reasons, and reimplementing or reverse engineering is troublesome, and may not be complete or as efficient.
There is of course Red Hat's Liberation Fonts, not sure how "equal" they are, but by renaming them they could be included by default.
Giving CrossOver/Wine access to the System fonts can also be a solution, at least on Macs, as they have a license to bundle the same fonts. Haven't installed Office in CX, so don't know if that is already done in some way.
Maybe on Macs this will eventually be solved by an Aquafied version of Wine (no damn X11), which should solve a lot of issues in one go.

For our supported apps, we do just what you suggest. If they need the Core Fonts, CrossOver installs the Core Fonts prior to installing that application. That's why CrossOver knows how to install the Core Fonts. It's also why those packages are called "dependencies" and hidden by default.

CrossOver already makes the Mac system fonts available to Windows programs. The problem is that the Mac fonts are not exactly equivalent to the Windows versions of those same fonts. One big issue is that the Windows fonts cover a wide range of non-Roman characters (Cyrillic, Greek, etc.) while the Mac fonts generally cover a narrower range of characters. (Mac OS X employs a font fallback mechanism so that, for example, Arial doesn't need Cyrillic glyphs because another font will supply them if they're called for.)

CrossOver can't implicitly install the fonts into bottles because the user is required to agree to a EULA.